White Terror

Michael Green who terrorised Tottenham Court Road in Central London on Friday 27^th April 2012 was a BNP member who previously stood for election in Stevenage. When he went to the offices of the company he asked for a black girl called Abby who you saw being interviewed on the news. Abby told him "Abby" wasn't there, saving herself from harm. Abby Baafi, 27, the head of training and operations at Advantage, a company which offers HGV courses, said the man had targeted her offices and was holding four men hostage. During the siege Green went on the rampage throwing computers out into the street. The threat provoked an armed police response with the tube station closed, a cordon around the area and bomb squad and emergency service back up.

Tottenham Court Road cordoned off during the incident

Luckily the incident ended without anybody being harmed. Police have now charged Michael Green over the three-hour London siege which closed one of the country's busiest shopping streets. He is accused of storming into the office in Tottenham Court Road and allegedly making threats and carrying a weapon. He has been charged with several offences including possession of a weapon for the discharge of a noxious liquid/gas or electrical incapacitating device; false imprisonment; making a bomb hoax; causing criminal damage and recklessly endangering life.

This is the second terrorist incident by a BNP member in this area, in April 1999, the Admiral Duncan Pub in Old Compton Street, Soho, which was a busy gay pub, was the scene of a bomb blast when the Neo-Nazi David Copeland detonated a nail bomb which killed three people and wounded around 70. Copeland planted three nail-bombs, one in Brixton, one in Brick Lane and one in Soho, in which three people died and around one hundred fifty people were seriously injured. His motivation was to target ethnic communities and gay venues to stir up strife in a city which values diversity.

Once again the media were keen to state that Copeland was an isolated individual despite the clear political motivation behind the bomb placements and the fact that he was proven to have stewarded BNP meetings.

So why no mention of the "T" word in the news reports on the Tottenham Court Road incident? Does it not apply if you are a beardless, white male?

More background on the excellent Big Smoke Blog.

http://www.bigsmoke.org.uk/?p=76116

The Scanner Scam

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Never one to cross the road to avoid an approaching bandwagon UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has given the go-ahead for full body scanners to be introduced at Britain's airports. BAA, which runs six UK airports rather badly, said it would now install the machines "as soon as is practical" at Heathrow. Experts have questioned the scanners' effectiveness at detecting the type of bomb allegedly used on Christmas Day in an attempted plane attack over Detroit.

Here's the latest hoop to jump through. Yes, there's a 'professional' that can see all your gadgetry. That part I don't personally mind, but just where is it gonna stop? This is incremental erosion of privacy and freedom, all in the name of the government protecting you.

The £80,000 full body scanners, which produce "naked" images of passengers, remove the need for "pat down" searches. They work by beaming electromagnetic waves on to passengers while they stand in a booth. A virtual three-dimensional image is then created from the reflected energy. Some have voiced concerns about privacy, with campaigners saying they are tantamount to a "strip search".

In the London Evening Standard Tory MP Ben Wallace, who was involved in the testing and development of the technology, warns it was not "the big silver bullet". He said the "passive millimeter wave scanners" probably would not have picked up the failed Detroit airliner plot or the explosives used in the 2005 London bombings.

Mr Wallace (Lancaster & Wyre) was employed by QinetiQ as their overseas director in the security and intelligence division. QinetiQ helped develop the passive millimeter wave technology. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The advantage of the millimeter waves are that they can be used at longer range, they can be quicker and they are harmless to travellers.


Body Scanner

"But there is a big but and the but was all the testing that we undertook, it was unlikely that it would have picked up the current explosive devices being used by al Qaeda. It probably wouldn't have picked up the Detroit Delta Airlines bomb on Christmas Day." He continued: "It probably wouldn't have picked up the very large plot with the liquids in 2006 at Heathrow or indeed the later July bombs that were used on the Tube because it wasn't very good and it wasn't that easy to detect liquids and plastics unless they were very solid plastics.

In the same paper columnist Sam Leith observes; “The political necessity of being seen to do something in the wake of a terror attempt means security rules are always out of sync. We wait for something we know was possible to be attempted, then panic about it. We're like public-health programmes vaccinating against last year's strain of flu.”

Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, said scanners were not the only solution and profiling passengers was, in fact, the best way to prevent terrorist acts. "We've got to face the fact that you can build a bomb in the duty free shop, after you've gone through screening. Bearing that in mind, we need to look at what people's intent is, not what they are carrying on their person."

Altogether with the questions over whether these scanners really work there is the question of knee jerk reactions to yesterday’s problems. The only really effective form of Airport security (ask El Al and the Israeli’s ) is that based on profiling rather than installing expensive equipment and creating nightmare queues for families with children, elderly, disabled and frequent flyers to go through. Of course the big disadvantage of this only proven secure method of protecting planes, airports and passengers is it can’t be carried out by scarcely trained outsourced minimum wage staff?

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS VIDEO TO SEE WHAT THESE SCANNERS ARE REALLY LIKE